ABSTRACT
There is a huge variety of instrumentation in use today throughout industry, especially in such fields as manufacturing and chemical analysis, that is driven by software encoded onto programmable chips. Such code, possessing characteristics both of hardware and software (in that it can be readily changed) is known as firmware. Accordingly, an audit of this activity and all its attendant documentation is, therefore, just as beneficial to the business as the assessment of applications written in native code. In these cases, an audit of the application to assess the level of in-built structural integrity is as essential as that for any other software written in native code. But that is not all. Since the functional requirements of the package will be to some extent general, it will also be necessary to audit the quality of the configuration work built on top of the package.
